“Mina!” My father’s impertinent tone pulled me from my thoughts once more. “Have you even been paying attention at all? Brighton is a family name, not a ‘pansy-ass girly name,’ as you put it.” I snickered at the thought of my father repeating those exact words back to me. He simply rolled his eyes. My father wasn’t a bad man, or even a hard one to deal with. He’d been good to us kids and was even guilty of spoiling myself and my two older siblings a bit as we grew up. That was the whole reason I even bothered to entertain this hairbrained scheme that would supposedly save his business from complete ruin.

It wasn’t that my father was bad in business, he simply had the misfortune of having a shitty partner. Uncle Max is what we called him growing up. Now, we called him ‘that douchebag who swindled our father and absconded with a huge portion of their joint business funds’. That was where Mister Pansy-Ass Name, I mean Samuel Brighton Tucker, came in.

See, he was interested in propping up my father’s business and becoming a partner, taking over where Max slinked out. At least, Samuel’s father was looking forward to mixing our family’s businesses. From what I understood, it was a way to get his son in line, so he could take over said family business eventually. I didn’t honestly know the whole gist of it, because as my father liked to point out, I tended to get swept up inside my own head, which meant I tuned a lot of the details out. The senior Mr. Tucker had put heads together with my father and betrothed his eldest son to my father’s youngest daughter. That would be me – in case you were wondering.

“So, I marry this Tucker guy, you merge your businesses together, and then what? I get a divorce?”

“Heavens no,” my father sputtered. “Let’s hope that you two learn to be companionable and that your marriage is lasting.”

“Okay, but I’m not under some weird ‘you can’t inherit unless you marry by age 30 and pop out some babies’ clause like Flynn was,” I argued. My brother had been the eldest, and the unlucky recipient of that particular clause in our grandparents’ Last Will and Testament. “So, why would I need to stay married to the guy?”

“Because the board will want to see that he has entered into, and remains in, a stable relationship before they’ll be convinced that he should take the helm of such a prolific business empire. His grandfather, father, and I all wish to retire sometime before we’re too old to enjoy retirement.”

“Okay, so how long are we talking?”

“Mina, this isn’t a time negotiation. If he’s impossible to deal with, we’ll work through it and get you out of the marriage, but I need you to go into this thinking that it’s for the long haul.” That was not exactly convincing me to go along with this hairbrained scheme. I thought it would just be a quickie marriage of convenience, not a life-long commitment.